


Dark Places

by goldheart



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Dubious Ethics, Emotional Manipulation, Explicit Language, M/M, Mentions of PTSD, Moral Ambiguity, Nightmares, Unhealthy Relationships, mormor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 05:47:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5528354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldheart/pseuds/goldheart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The man who stands in Moriarty's shadow will make London tremble at his name.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dark Places

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Deanna13321](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deanna13321/gifts).
  * Inspired by [These Violent Delights](https://archiveofourown.org/works/910519) by [pasiphile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pasiphile/pseuds/pasiphile). 



> Happy late birthday, and Merry Christmas, Mona. Thank you for the inspiration and the drive to finish something, for once. 
> 
> This story was inspired by pasiphile's epic, _These Violent Delights._ I don't have the words to express how much that fic has influenced my view on both Moran and Moriarty, but you can probably tell. I hope to one day reach that caliber of writing, but, until then, enjoy my first (and probably last) attempt at 2nd POV.

 It's only your breathing you can hear, your heavy breaths and the thundering of your heart, threatening to break out of your chest. Your breath burns in your lungs, scraping against your throat and forcing itself in and out of you with your body's frantic rush to give you your strength back. Blood seeps sluggishly from the graze slashed across your arm, marring tan skin and black ink and destroying your jacket as you rub your stinging fingers together, feeling alive and free and gasping, naively, for more.

Wet footfalls in shallow puddles of blood announce the approach of the man behind you. You force yourself to stay still.

'Well done,' a soft voice whispers in your ear, ghosting over your skin. You shiver, half-delighted and half-scared. 'Very well done. You'll do.'

His fingers trail across the back of your neck.

‘Tell me your name,’ he demands.

* * *

You’re not content to be a supporting character in your own life, but everyone has their assigned roles, and you’ve so thoroughly broken out of your own that you'll take this, a thousand times, over the alternative. After all, it's difficult to compete against the hurricane who _is_ the star, threatening to destroy civilisation with a twitch of his fingers.

'This is my world,' Moriarty says, standing on the edge of a hospital roof with a cigarette dangling from his gloved fingers. 'You're all just living in it. All of you, directed by strings hanging from the ceiling. Pull the right ones, and you force reactions...' He mimes wrapping his free fingers around a rope, tugging backwards. 'Friends, family, money, passions, drugs, sentiment, religion.'

You fight the urge to pull him away, to wrap your fingers around the collar of his coat and yank him back to safety, because he has enough danger simmering under his skin to scare the edge into either holding him in place or dumping him onto the pavement in disgust.

'Watch carefully,' Moriarty commands with his soft voice, tossing his cigarette off the roof. 'Look for the signs, the tells. They know who I am, every single one of them, stumbling through life with their tangled strings. They will talk and speculate and worry, poor little things.'

He turns, his eyes glowing with simmering threat and untried genius and ambition, crashing against each other with a storm's fury.

'Soon, they won't dare to speak my name.'

You’ve never seen void-brown eyes so bright and so dark at the same time.

* * *

There is no better place on Earth to watch the spectacle unfold. It's a bit like one of the plays they'd put on at Eton, dressing up boys in silly costumes and making them dance across the stage. Where each person is speaking words written for him in steady, neat script. Where the director sits in his throne, making snipping gestures with his fingers and commanding you to cut the scene.

You try it once, when Moriarty is feeling particularly sadistic, on a man who dared spit in the criminal’s face, thinking that the old money and the family name and the power radiating from his self-righteous pores would make him immune to a little Irish man in a suit. Funny enough, it would have worked with any other person, whether he be interested in grovelling or fearful of the outcome.

‘There are two kinds of ordinary people,’ Moriarty says, watching you tie the knots into place. ‘Those who know when to shut up and think, and those who don’t.’

You string the unfortunate from the underside of a bridge in the early hours of the morning, a ball gag shoved between the man’s teeth to keep him quiet. The two of you watch as he struggles weakly in the darkness, a writhing silhouette moving and fruitlessly unseen. Your finger rests on the trigger, the gun aimed at the single rope binding him above the Thames.

‘Have you ever fit into either category?’ you dare to ask, when the last noise to break the sound of twisting rope and flowing river was a car that drove past twenty minutes ago. Moriarty smiles in the darkness, all sharp white teeth.

‘I’m disappointed. Usually you know not to ask stupid questions.’ He tilts his head up at the body swinging from the beams. ‘Cut the strings.’

You raise your gun and fire at the rope. Carefully, you look away before the man hits the water, unable to hide your own grin.

‘Best seat in the house,’ you mutter.

Moriarty doesn’t laugh; he _giggles_.

* * *

Sometimes, though, you forget that you _are_ one of his game pieces, hitching along for the ride. You’re self-aware, sure, but that doesn’t stop you from blindly following directions, because you know how this ends.

Until.

The day your crap flat goes up in flames is the day you’re well and truly fucked over, because you barely bat an eyelid before you drag your rifle and your dignity to Moriarty’s– _Jim’s_ –posh door in Chelsea, running your finger over the familiar etching of a magpie on the doorknob. He lets you in with this little smile, like he knows exactly what you want to say and is only reassuring you that he won’t answer you.

Don’t be obvious, his eyes say.

And you can’t help it. You’re obnoxious and loud and you’ve always commanded a room, always, so when you’re forced to knock it down a peg and bend around someone a little more dangerous, a little more obtrusive, you fight. But where you’re brute strength and military composure and unending swagger, he’s darting movements and vicious attacks and biting words, and against that, you _never_ win.

So you fight, and you lose, and you fight a little more, and lose again, until one day you can’t stop talking, because you are who you are and there’s no such thing as the edge of the cliff when you run. ‘You know, if you had just asked me to move in instead of blowing up my flat, this whole arrangement might have worked out a little more in your favour.’

Every object in the building takes a deep breath and holds it. Jim’s fingers twitch like he wants to reach for your throat and tear it out with his fingernails, but miraculously, you don’t die quite yet.

Instead, he says, ‘Now, where’s the fun in that?’

You stare.

‘Chaos,’ he explains, smiling at you like you’re the greatest idiot on the planet. ‘I keep you around because you fight back against everything for no reason at all. What use is a docile tiger in an arena?’

And he passes you by without laying a finger on you.

* * *

Once, you wake with the warm, sluggish iron of a nosebleed seeping down the back of your throat and repeated wetness on your lips from where your teeth have dug into your flesh from the unconscious effort of trying to muffle your screams.

 _You’re fine,_ you tell yourself, blinking against the violent, crimson-stained images imprinted on the back of your eyelids. _You’re fine, you’re fine, you’re okay._

You pull your t-shirt up over your face and mop up what you can, breathing hard against the blood-moistened fabric until you calm yourself down enough to get up and wash the sheets. It’s been months since you’ve had a nightmare this intense; your ears are ringing, and your vision is blurry, and you can still taste your blood and the phantom grit of sand against your tongue. Still, you can’t calm your breathing, and after you dump the sheets into the machine, you stand there for a moment, trying to calm your thundering heart and the odd gasps slipping between your teeth.

When you come back from the washing machine, he’s sitting on the edge of your bare mattress, his dark, dark eyes landing on you like lamps in the two-in-the-morning blackness. You brace yourself for the questions and the disappointing glances, leaning against the door in faux confidence and bravado.

‘You’re going to America,’ he says instead. ‘CIA. Stolen, classified information. They’re smart; no need to get the British Government involved, we both know how much they’d gloat.’

You swallow. It’s still metallic.

 _How long were you listening? How long were you watching?_ you ask him silently. He levels his gaze, raising an eyebrow.

 _Long enough,_ he means.

* * *

Slowly, they stop talking about him, and they start whispering. Then they stop whispering, except for the exceptionally brave, exceptionally ignorant, and the exceptional people paid to keep spreading his influence like butter over toast. You are one of them, spelling out his name in favours and threats and blood across the world. ‘Teaching them a lesson,’ Jim calls it, dangling his metaphorical crown from his fingers.

It helps that you know how to aim and fire in the same breath, when the endless adrenaline sends you soaring high on exhilaration; that you’re tall and still in peak military condition and littered with the scars that say you’ve been thrown into a hellhole, shredded, and spit back out with salt in your wounds and rage snarling in your ears until you couldn’t hear yourself thinking. Soon, you too become someone with a name and a face, with your own fearful whispers following in your shadows.

But do you have a name? Do you? He’s wiped every trace of your existence from every electronic system in the world, burned your birth certificate and your diploma and your discharge papers and your only legitimate passport. You’re a rumour, in truth, present by his side without proof. In the world, you’re a body attached to your rifle, when you’re not the boot stepping down on the neck of the first man who dares to question your competency before you fire at the driver of the speeding lorry from 1500 metres away and you don’t miss.

That’s just it. You don’t miss. It doesn’t matter that you’ve been an integral part of missions that have gone horribly pear-shaped from the start. It matters that you aim and you fire, sometimes without even a single breath between them, and you always hit the centre of every target that he paints for you.

It doesn’t help you try to claim your own damn name when he starts looking at you and you start forgetting it, because his fingers are always cold when they trace the stories written across your skin and suck your very identity away from you with every sound he elicits from your mouth.

At some point, the line that separates _him_ and _you_ blurs until they can’t tell where he ends and you begin, and at last, Moriarty becomes more than just a man.

* * *

Then Jim’s eyes find the Holmes brothers, and you are left hopelessly behind with your half-healed wounds and your nameless body and the poisonous envy that sits heavily at the base of your lungs, keeping you from breathing properly.

* * *

 _Chaos is not inherently evil,_ you remind yourself when the police take Jefferson Hope’s body from the further education college and wrap your competition in an orange blanket–I’m not in shock, Holmes protests, and you promise he will be–before letting him just walk away. _Chaos is not inherently evil,_ you think, your finger on the trigger in the extra darkness that the shadows offer in the dark of the night. Just a breathe-aim-fire, and someone dies, and the whole operation falls into blissful disorder.

But you won’t. You won’t, because you are here and Jim doesn’t know, and Sherlock Holmes walks with a weathered soldier who carries his own scars and nightmares and supporting role. Damn you, you can see yourself right there, walking away into the open future with the genius around whom you find your orbit. So you drop your hands to your sides and you walk away before Mycroft Holmes can look closely enough to separate your darkness from the shadows that settle around you. 

* * *

You find yourself staring down through your scope at three men and blue pool water and enough semtex strapped to a vest to make the whole building crash down around your ears, and you curse yourself for your moral ambiguity. You should have put them down like dogs when you had the chance, Holmes and Watson, because you forgot: if you were watching yourself, you’d shoot you, too.

But now you can’t, because you and your seven other snipers are camped out on the mezzanine and Jim’s taunting the detectives, five bloody feet away from the bomb and the red light on the end of your rifle. You know this game, you’ve played it many times, but in the past you’ve only done it with a deck of cards and twenty quid, not a set of carefully chosen words and lives.

‘Playing Jim from IT. Playing gay,’ he says, and you half want to flinch, half want to laugh because this is so ridiculous, the double-triple bluffing, and for one terrifying moment, you wonder if he’s lied to you all this time.

But you do nothing, because of course he’s lied to you, keeping his secrets so tightly wrapped around himself that you can only begin to guess at them. You are fairly certain that Jim doesn't fake the gasps and tremors that you steal from him at night, slowly taking him apart and putting him back together again and letting him do the same to you.

Watson grabs Jim from behind. You curse nastily in whispers, heart in your throat as you try to think above the possessive and fearful snarling of the beast in your head. Then clarity hits you head-on, and you gesture firmly at the only woman on your team, a pretty blonde just a few years your senior, and she turns her rifle towards Holmes’s head.

Jim leaves. He doesn't go the right way. You grip your gun a little bit tighter, as if that will stop your anger from shaking it apart.

Then there’s a calm voice in your ear and explicit instructions that you want to ignore because what he suggests is the possibility of drifting without a primary character to your story, and that is inexcusable. But you can't disobey, because the puppetmaster knows what he is doing, always six-seven-eight steps ahead of everyone around him, and when you tighten your finger on the trigger, the sound that follows is not a blast, but instead a tinny, musical slap in the face of a reminder to stay the fuck alive.

* * *

You slam him into the wall when the two of you stumble back into the flat, your rage burning furiously red-hot under the top layers of your skin. He only looks at you coolly, those bright-dark eyes daring you to hit him, _just do it,_ and god, you want to shake him and scream and break down and kiss the fucking smirk off his face, but you don't do any of those things.

‘I’m going to die of a fucking heart attack before you get the chance to murder me,’ you growl instead, holding his shoulders against the white walls with the back of your trembling forearm. ‘Hate to disappoint.’

Jim smiles, all teeth, like he’s learning from you that the wider he grins, the more terrifying he gets. But you’re not in the mood to be frightened, and instead, you recognise his silence as surprise, like you’ve done something enigmatic. You make a frustrated noise, deep in your throat, and release him like he’s burned you, turning away and attempting to get your hands to stop shaking. He straightens his suit with a sharp tug.

‘This would work better if you just told me what you were doing,’ you say evenly, closing your eyes against the crimson of your fury and the jade of your envy.

He approaches you with the quiet not-quite-caution of a trainer to a wounded predator, not touching, not breathing, not taking up enough space for you to lash out effectively. Your nostrils still smart with the bleach-white stench of chlorine.

‘I’m not God,’ he says. ‘Some things are out of my control. Sometimes, things need to be postponed, and sometimes, they work out in your favour. Vexing, isn't it?’

He presses his phone into your hand and leaves you to collect your thoughts.

* * *

Your father used to look at you with this mixed expression of disgust and disappointment. The mistake, the changeling child, born in a world where you would never belong, no matter how much your mother would weep and lament. _If only you had been born a girl,_ she would say with her tears. _Then I could break you._

You doubt it. It’s not like a pair of tits would have stopped you from hating the bureaucracy that your parents soaked themselves in. All it would have done is that it would have stopped you from joining the SAS when you enlisted halfway through Oxford, fed up with the person they were trying to create out of the gunpowder and rebellion in your blood.

Then again, it’s not like the military did much good for you, either. More order was what you thought you needed, and more order was what you received, along with the burns and the scars across the right side of your body and nightmares and what was definitely not fucking PTSD, thanks. You went in a rebel and came out a feral beast, akin to the ones they used to pit against you for entertainment when the government abandoned you to its enemies for months that you don’t care to remember too deeply.

It’s why you slipped back into London a predator among sheep, wielding your unrest like an unseen knife and finding your home in that beautiful chaos called the underworld. Your parents weeped outwardly, but secretly wiped their brows because finally, you were gone to lies and an officer in uniform murmuring, ‘ _I_ _have been asked to inform you that your son has been reported dead in Helmand Province, Afghanistan...’_

 _Tiger,_ Jim calls you, because of the quadruple lines across your cheekbones and the orange and black ink over your shoulder and the hostility against an authority that has failed to convince you that you can and should be tamed. It’s not your name; you don’t have one anymore. He still whispers that in your ear, but the three syllables, even in that familiar, soft Dublin brogue, sound foreign to you. It’s the one thing he doesn’t understand: that when you signed your contract with his devil, you gave him _everything_ but your spirit. He calls you Tiger, and he whispers the thing that used to be your name, but it means nothing to you.

He cuts his brand into your back, straddling your hips and dragging his blade down in four slow strokes between your shoulder blades while you fist your hands into the pristinely white sheets. You wonder if he’ll just keep the fabric instead of throwing it away when it’s stained with your blood, tracing your outline in evidence that you are an owned creature, wild and free and captive and tamed with the M carved into your flesh.

You are a changeling son of nobility and the prince of dark places. You are a free man and a slave and a beast from the pits and your own supporting character. Now, when you wake with blood on your teeth and your throat raw from screaming, you think that you wouldn’t have it any other way.

* * *

He walks like a dancer. Each placement of his feet is calculated ten steps in advance. He can blend into the background like a wallflower in one moment and command the attention of the whole room in the next. Every single face he presents to the world is a mask, moulded perfectly to fulfill his purpose and give each person exactly what they expect, want, and need. Sometimes, you wonder if what he shows you is a mask, as well; after all, it would be extremely arrogant of you to believe that you are the sole person to really know what he’s like, under all of the lies and schemes and oh-so-careful planning.

Then again, you’re the cockiest bastard on the planet, so you’ll keep fooling yourself.

He plays Irene Adler like a fiddle, plucking her mind out from the crowd and slowly feeding her his poison. You watch as he gives her hints about his chaos, baiting her with puzzles and opportunity and direction and she falls for it. She thinks of it as a business transaction, where she receives help in return for his chance at wreaking more havoc. Jim laughs when she leaves, turning his head into your shoulder and shaking with the delight.

He mimes pulling on strings, like tugging a corset closed until the woman can’t breathe. She doesn't even notice, poor thing, as vanity clouds her judgement and makes her more and more arrogant. You would know; he has the same effect on you. But you’ve been around long enough to think you’re aware enough to pay attention. You can't help but imagine yourself in her position, where you play and play and play and pretend you don't know when to stop until he beckons and you come running back.

Oh, but she’s a fighter, feisty little thing, and she seems to know exactly how to push Jim’s buttons. However, you know when it’s marginally safe enough to do so and when you need to back the fuck off because he’s a word away from acting on that promise to flay you alive. It’s just your bloody luck that he’s ready to explode with irritation; the murder in his eyes is not playful in the least, and every time she so much as glances your way, you fear that the knife constantly at your back will end up flicking her throat open, valuable or not.

She kisses you on the cheek, because she knows that you’ve played her game before, many, many, many times. Jim looks like he’s going to combust in the way a nuclear bomb makes the ground shake.

He has buttons, and it seems like he wears his emotions on his sleeve when it comes to you, but the instant you two are alone, he sheds the masks.

‘Did you really think?’ He gives a condescending little giggle. You pretend like you remembered it was all just a trick.

Or was it? Sex is sex, which you, Irene, and Jim know all too well. It doesn't have to be personal. It almost never is, for someone like you.

And yet.

And yet, now that you think about it, you’ve been monogamous for years. If you had told yourself that you were committing to anything even loosely resembling a steady relationship circa 2005, your younger self would have laughed you out the door.

You flirt back at her, and his eyes flicker with something dark and unidentifiable.

And yet.

* * *

You don’t have to think about it for long. He warned her not to show weakness, to seal every hole in her end of his carefully executed plan to destroy Mycroft Holmes, but everyone stumbles, and you watch her metaphorical heel snap from a distance. A crocodile’s tears spill from her eyes, yes, though they roll down her face with true emotion and defeat.

Jim gives you significant expressions while you watch her fall, but lays a hand over your scope to stop you from firing.

‘Leave her,’ he instructs gently, the way a cobra lifts its head calmly from the ground. ‘Complete abandonment is worse than any death I could offer her now.’

You know it's a warning, and an extremely pointed one at that. Nevertheless, you are a relatively unchanging man. You know where your loyalties lie. You know how not to get caught. Power plays of the mind are for people like Jim and Irene, who delight in the thought, while you find your pleasure in the physical. You yourself live to please.

You shift out of your position, cracking your neck and shaking out your stiff muscles under his scrutinising gaze. ‘Is she replaceable?’ you ask calmly, refusing to break eye contact.

He stares back at you, his eyes narrowing slightly. ‘No,’ he says finally, resting his fingers on your gun. ‘But we can deal without.’

You chance a glance back in the window. In front of a blazing fire, Sherlock Holmes gloats, though he’s rubbish at hiding his true emotions; he’s filled with hatred and disappointment. You watch as he leaves. He slams the door like a kid throwing a temper tantrum.

 _What do you see in that?_ you want to ask Jim, oh, so badly. But you’re too much of a coward to open your mouth to his retreating back.

* * *

It is two days before your damned birthday when Jim rests his lips against your throat and presses something hard into your hand. Your fingers curl around the USB stick instinctively as he pulls away, something distant and determined resting behind the gleeful grin on his face.

‘Tiger,’ he calls you, and though that’s not your name, you understand why. You’re as territorial as the great cats, and you give yourself away too easily.

You know what that USB means. Before you put it in a computer, you already know that it’s filled with blueprints, access codes, instructions, and information that you understand, because you’ve been groomed as a second-in-command since you stuck your nose into business where you shouldn’t have and plucked a genius cabbie driver from obscurity to place in his games. The knowledge coils around your throat, choking you with implications and scenarios that flash before your eyes like the end of your life, because, as independent as you are, you can’t imagine yourself as a free man.

Hastily, you take his wrist in your grip and hold on too tightly. ‘Whatever you’re planning, it’s stupid as hell.’

He bats your hand away, a condescending expression on his face. ‘Don’t lecture me on what’s stupid and what isn’t. You’re hardly a voice of wisdom on the matter.’

Ouch.

‘Tell me,’ you say, and try to not make it sound like you’re begging. ‘Jim.’

He dances away, all coy grace, still playing. You snarl, rising to your feet with muscles coiled for a hunt, but he puts up a hand to quiet you in dismissal. ‘You never consider the game. Sacrifices have to be made for the win. Don’t look so lost.’ He smiles at you. ‘I’ll be back.’

It hits you like a train. ‘You’re going to let them take you.’

‘Ah, so you _do_ have a brain!’ he purrs. ‘They’re going to take me whether you like it or not. I have something everyone wants.’

He reaches in front of you, opening the always-running application for his CCTV footage. It shows an office containing three men in suits looking more disheveled than they ever should, caught in a panic. You squint and make out the ‘Moriarty’ that dominates their words, fuzzy as the footage is. Your blunt nails dig into your palm hard enough to draw blood.

And then he tells you. There’s a skeleton key, he claims, that can open any door, anywhere. That kind of power is impossible to truly achieve–not even you are that gullible–but you know how the government cronies think. You’ve watched him play them enough times to understand how they will react. He’s planted the seeds of fear in their tiny minds, because, after all, he’s done the impossible before. So they’ll come after him before someone else does and interrogate him until he gives up.

But you know Jim Moriarty, and he won’t give up his game. The thought of what they will do to him makes you sick, because it’s torture, like the roar of the beast in your ears and the scratches across your face remind you. Your hand tightens around the USB in response. ‘Have you ever been tortured? Have you? Because it’s not fucking fun, Jim. It’s _not_ a game.’

He tugs you closer by the back of your neck, the little bastard’s fingers digging into your skin hard enough to leave bruises. ‘It’s always a game. Don’t start thinking I care about your opinion.’

That one hurts like a bitch, and he knows it. He lets go of you and straightens his suit while you try to make the red that spreads in your vision disappear. You fail. You know you’re shaking, but you can’t take it anymore. You shove past him and tear through the hallways until you reach the ladder to the roof, gasping for air and the pack of cigarettes in your pocket.

When you go back down, he’s gone.

* * *

You become Moriarty.

It’s not as simple as stepping into his shoes. Already, you and he had been extensions of the same entity: You the brawn, and he the brain. Instead, it’s like a ghost settling into the wrong body. You stumble. You find that your fingers are too big for the delicate configurations of his spiderwebs. But you fight for it like your life depends on it (and it does, really, because what else are you supposed to do?) and you win.

 _I’m not evil,_ you think as you command his–your–employees to continue their chaotic activities. And you’re not, because you find yourself with clients from both sides, foreign and domestic government and not. Your bullets carve through the air neither to save nor to destroy. You rescue a child from a rival with only the name that isn’t yours and a disarming little smile. You blow up a warehouse.

The M on your back burns each time you stalk the cameras like an owner, rather than the property, as if to remind you of what you really are. The reminder is clear, when no one is in his cell to beat him and receive nothing in return and his eyes bore into your screen: you are a shitty backup plan, but better than anything else the world has to offer.

When he finally comes back, tossed aside in frustration by Mycroft Holmes like a broken doll, you take him home. He’s so much quieter. His touches become frantic at the oddest of times, like he can’t believe that you’re a real person. And then he snaps back into himself, like a rubber band that’s been stretched too wide and comes back with a wicked sting, and you feel like you’re running in circles.

‘Fairytales,’ he murmurs out of the blue one night, writing stories onto your chest with his cold fingers in nonsensical strings of sentences. ‘Everything’s a story, Tiger, and all fairytales end the same way.’ He laughs quietly to himself, like it’s some kind of joke, and fuck it, you’ll never understand.

You don’t give back the power he gave you. He doesn’t ask.

And that terrifies you.

* * *

Everything comes back to Sherlock fucking Holmes. That’s the knife that finally slips between your ribs, making the deepest cut that leaves you gasping with pain and flailing for something to hold onto. You forgot, of course, that you are merely the side role, always meant to be shunted off to the side in favour of something a little more interesting for James Moriarty. But, after all, you’re a nameless creature.

His grand finale approaches with the force of a speeding car, knocking everything out of his way with banks and prisoners and a crown on top of his pretty little head. Despite his clear request not to get involved, you find yourself at the centre of his stage, where once you were the audience sitting in the best seat in the house. You don’t know how long it’s been, this play. Days. Months. Years. They all blend together; insignificant as the curtain rises for the final act. You are the phantom that no one can see, and yet, you are as tangible as the director himself, who has cast himself as the antagonist to Holmes’s tragic hero.

You endure the trial from the back of the room, though you’ve read this script before. You endure Kitty Riley, the simpering journalist who takes more of Jim’s attention than you in the name of the act. You endure the shadows that darken his face and leech his energy from his bones, leaving him ranting and railing aimlessly at nothing, like the insanity has truly settled into his skin.

You endure, because you have to.

But it doesn’t matter, in the end. He takes the gun from your grip and holds it close to his chest, like a lifesaver, and kisses you like you’re the beginning of the universe and the end of his world, wrapped up tightly in a package that belongs only to him. Then he makes you watch from the centre of it all, tied to your post like a convict to the stake. You can do nothing but stare through your scope, your phone calls uselessly ringing out as the sound of a gunshot fills the air, and he falls.

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

You think you’ve finally learned the rules to that stupid game. And, after all this time, you realise the person that he played against had always been you.

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

‘Tell me your name,’ he demands.

You are a changeling son of nobility and the prince of dark places.  You are a mercenary and a sniper and a lover and a tiger on the hunt.

Blood soaks into your sleeve where a bullet grazed your arm, marring tan skin and black ink and destroying your jacket as you rub your stinging fingers together.

You feel alive and free and you gasp, naively, for more.

‘Sebastian,’ you answer.


End file.
